• Lead Designer

  • Responsive

  • May, 2013

The HP Embedded Web Server (EWS) is an administrative tool built into all HP printers that can be easily accessed using most popular web browsers. It is used to set up new HP printers, monitor usage and printing supplies, configure settings, and troubleshoot any printer problems.


I served as the interaction designer, as well as the project lead, for the EWS program. I created the strategy plan to converge a unified experience across all HP printers. To accomplish these ambitious goals, I lead a team of global designers and developers from the United States, Singapore, Spain, and Brazil in an effort to design the next-generation of EWS - an EWS that was user friendly and mobile ready.

I conducted a heuristic evaluation on the existing EWS platform to better understand its workflows, supported features - as well as to find any existing usability issues. The research highlighted many areas for improvements, namely on high-level structure and converged workflows. I collaborated with program partners and stakeholders to create a design strategy roadmap. This roadmap was successfully funded and expanded to include a revamp of the entire EWS design - a major achievement for a design-led initiative that spans HP's various business units (laser printers, inkjet printers, and graphics printers/plotters).

I organized and lead a design workshop in HP’s Singapore Design Center. We assembled an international team of designers and developers from the United States, Singapore, Spain, and Brazil. The workshop served as one of the first of many efforts to align the design and user experience work being done in the different design centers around the world. These efforts marked a new approach in printer and software design: an ecosystem approach. The results of the team’s efforts was a Design Toolkit, that designers and developers could use when developing future versions of the EWS.


I worked closely with a design researcher to collect the various personas created across all of HP’s printer portfolio, which we used as the basis for the user profile exercise. During the workshop, I separated the workshop participants into various groups to discuss and group these user profiles based on key traits and findings. As a team, we then formulated the EWS user profiles based on these accumulated traits and findings.


One of the activities that I conducted as part of the workshop was cardsorting, during which workshop participants were required to role-play various personas while piecing together the information architecture (IA). From the various arrangements created, we created a grouping that had the most commonalities and created the initial draft of the IA - a draft that we was later tested and refined.

The second phase of the workshop involved creating high-level workflows. I pre-selected a few key features for the team to discuss that would allow them to conceptualize their workflows. From this exercise, we created rules and design principles to guide workflow creation and improvement.


Working with the developers and requestors, I created high-fidelity wireframes to showcase the solutions we created. Based on these wireframes, I conducted internal studies to identify potential usability problems (which would be rectified in subsequent updates). These wireframes were also used as visual representations to gain sign off from our stakeholders.


As part of a high-level strategy to pre-empt design supports for mobile users, I also created wireframes for mobile representation of the EWS. I lead this “mobile first” initiative to promote mobile-friendly design through the use of responsive design. The EWS has, as a result, been designed to scale according to the display type.

A user study was conducted to test the new EWS design and its mobile feasibility. I created test scripts and prepared all necessary materials for the study. I worked with an external agency to recruit users and facilitate the test. (Working with an external agency ensured credibility, since the study could not be perceived as being influenced by anyone involved in EWS design and development.) Results of this user study were reviewed, and usability issues were identified and fixed in subsequent sprint cycles.


I documented all interaction design information in a specification. This document was used as a global reference for future EWS designs: the EWS team referred to it during the implementation process, and the quality team used it when testing the implementation.


I collaborated with a visual designer to create the visual style guide. This document compliments the interaction design document, specifying all the necessary measurements, color specifications, and types of visual assets required in the interface.

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